From The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth... that man is not truly one, but truly two.... It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date... I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

...both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition...

At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion;

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